In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, it is common practice to conduct both scientific and market studies of how medicines or treatments work on either human beings or animals. As part of such studies, medicines or treatments are often compared to medicines, either new or existing, or treatments already on the market.
To gather a sufficient supply of those medicines or treatments already on the market for testing, the commercially available products are pooled together in a collection container and then re-packaged for use in new or ongoing studies.
Prior art systems and methods for pooling small volumes of liquid are essentially manual operations in which workers use their hands to first manually remove the tops from individual bottles of liquid medicines and then manually dump the contents out of the bottles, typically a small volume of a liquid medicine, into a collection container. This process of pooling together small volumes of liquid medicines is typically conducted in a controlled environment to assure that the medications are not contaminated.
Risks associated with the manual pooling of small volumes of liquid medicine include contamination and spillage. In addition, the simple act of manually removing tops from multiple individual bottles and then dumping the contents into a container can expose workers to repetitive-motion type injuries.
Accordingly, a need remains in the art for an automated system and method for pooling small volumes of liquids in a controlled environment to reduce the incidence of contamination and spillage as well as eliminating the exposure of workers to repetitive-motion type injuries.